I was going to start this post by sharing my vaccination status but in the end decided it was irrelevant. In the same way that you don’t need to know if I agree with abortion or not…. what you do need to know is that I’m pro choice.
When it comes to our own body and what we do with it surely it’s a fundamental right to be able to make our own choice. I may not agree with the choice people make but that is my cross to bear. I do however, strongly with every fibre of my being believe that every person should have a choice.
And that choice should be without fear of prejudice, discrimination or repercussions from anyone once except the person making the decision.
So why am I wading into the debate about vaccinations? Because I dislike the way that we seem to becoming polarised into the have’s and have not’s, the pro and the anti. I’ve got a foot in two communities who are handling the pandemic and the vaccination situation very differently. One where I believe the majority of the population is vaccinated and the other where I believe the majority not to be. Do I feel safer or more exposed in either…no! Because I control my behaviour in ways that I feel necessary regardless of where I am. At the end of the day that’s all I can do to keep myself and my family safe.
However, I feel one is less judgemental than the other and that’s the one I feel better in.
So I come back to the issue of pro choice. I believe those doctors and nurses, the very same ones that turned up and looked after thousands and thousands of sick people, have the right to choose.
They turned up for work day in and day out at the beginning often without even the proper PPE to protect them. They have seen colleagues and friends get sick and if they still feel like they don’t want to get vaccinated how can we now tell them you have to.
How can any government say if you don’t you will get suspended from your job? The memories of people are really very short that we were willing to let them turn up while we sat relatively safely in our homes isolating in 2020 to now turn around and say you don’t have a right to make a choice about your own body without fear of losing that very same job.
Yes this is the extreme example but this is the one that often comes into my minds when people are being negatively labelled anti-vaccers and there are calls for compulsory vaccinations.
We all make decisions about what we do and how we behave. We will all do different things to keep ourselves safe and different things to make ourselves happy. We won’t all agree on what we should and should not be doing but it comes back to that word again… choice.
So I hope for 2022, if nothing else, we can try and channel more of that compassion, care and solidarity that we felt in 2020. The division and disuniting of 2021 has taken it’s toll on our mental health and in the midst of all of this mess let’s take care of each other, regardless of our choices.